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Art
Romanesque (10th-13th C.)
From the 8th century, most of Spain was under Moorish rule. The Muslims took the biblical injunction against graven images so seriously that they produced no art in a traditional Western sense -- though the remarkably intricate geometric designs and swooping, exaggerated letters of Kufic inscriptions played out in woodcarving, painted tiles, and plasterwork on Moorish palaces are decorations of the highest aesthetic order.
Starting with the late-10th-century Reconquest, Christian Spaniards began producing art in the northern and eastern provinces. Painting and mosaics in Catalonia show the Byzantine influence of northern Italy, while sculptures along the northerly pilgrimage route to Compostela are related to French models, though they are often more symbolic (and primitive looking) than realistic.
Significant examples include:
Códex del Beatus. A Mozarab (a Christian living under Moorish rule), the monk Beatus de Liébana illuminated this 10th-century "Commentary on the Apocalypse" manuscript in an influential hybrid style, which includes many Arabic devices. Its pages are now dispersed internationally; the best remaining chunk is in Girona's Catedral.
Barcelona's Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. Most of Catalonia's great Romanesque paintings were detached from their village churches in the early 20th century and are now housed in this museum.
Santiago de Compostela's Cathedral. The Pórtico de la Gloria is a 12th-century masterpiece of Romanesque sculpture.
Gothic (13th-16th C.)
The influences of Catalonia and France continued to dominate in the Gothic era -- though, in painting especially, a dollop of Italian style and a dash of Flemish attention to detail were added. In this period, colors became more varied and vivid, compositions more complex, lines more fluid with movement, and features more expressive.
Significant artists and examples include:
Jaime Huguet (1415-92). The primary artist in the Catalán School, Huguet mixed Flemish and Italian influences with true local Catalán Romanesque conventions. He left works in his native Barcelona's Palau Reial and Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.
Bartolomé Bermejo (active 1474-98). Though Andalusian by birth, Bermejo was the lead painter in the Italianate Valencian School, and the first Spanish painter to use oils. Some of his best early paintings are in Madrid's Museo del Prado; one of his last is La Pietat (1498) in the Catedral de Barcelona.
Fernando Gallego (1466-1507). Leader of the Gothic Castilian School, Gallego worked in a strong Flemish style melded to Spanish traditions, most evident in his masterpiece triptych in Salamanca's Catedral Vieja.
Renaissance (16th C.)
Renaissance means "rebirth," in this case of classical ideals originating in ancient Greece and Rome. Artists strove for greater naturalism, using recently developed techniques such as linear perspective to achieve new heights of realism. The style started in Italy, and only slowly displaced Spain's Gothic tendencies. When it finally got rolling in Spain, the style had already mutated into the baroque.
Significant artists include:
Pedro Berruguete (1450-1504). The court painter to Ferdinand and Isabella, Berruguete worked for a time in Italy's Urbino, where he picked up an Italian softness, ethereality, and chiaroscuro (the dramatic play of areas of harsh lighting off dark shadows) to add to his Flemish-influenced obsession with details and Spanish-style gold backgrounds. You can see his works in the Catedral de Avila and Jaén's Museo Provincial.
Alonso Berruguete (1488-1561). Pedro's talented son was not only court painter to Charles V, but also the greatest native sculptor in Spain, having traveled to Italy to study painting under Filippino Lippi and sculpture with Michelangelo himself. The latter studies lent him a powerful, natural style intent on expressing the psychology of his figures in such masterworks as San Sebastián (1526-32) in Valladolid's Museo Nacional de Escultura, and a reredos (a floor piece with biblical scenes in relief, 1539-43) in the Catedral de Toledo.
Juan de Juni (1507-77). A Frenchman who also took up Michelangelo's sensibilities, sculptor Juni developed a Catalán Renaissance style that predicted the baroque in its expressiveness and drama. His greatest works are in Valladolid, including Entombments (1544) in the Museo Nacional de Escultura, and an altarpiece (1551) in the cathedral, as well as a Deposition (1571) reredos in the Cabildo Catedral de Segovia.
El Greco (1540-1614). Spain's most significant Renaissance artist was actually from Crete. Domenikos Thetocopoulos (his real name) traveled first to Italy, where he picked up Tintoretto's color palette in Venice and the twisting figures of late Renaissance mannerism in Rome. He headed to Toledo (then Spain's capital) to seek his fortune with a combination of weirdly lit scenes, broodingly dark colors, crowded compositions, eerily elongated figures, and a mystical touch. Toledo's churches and Casa y Museo de El Greco retain many of his works, as does Madrid's Museo del Prado; other works are scattered across Spain in collections at Sitges, Bilbao, Valencia, Seville, Cuenca, El Escorial, and Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fine Arts museums.
Baroque (17th-18th C.)
The baroque was Spain's greatest artistic era, producing several painters who rank among Europe's greatest. A more theatrical and decorative take on the Renaissance, the baroque had a rich exuberance that dovetailed nicely with Spain's Counter-Reformation fervor. The style mixes a kind of super-realism based on the use of peasant models and the chiaroscuro or tenebrism (the dramatic play of areas of harsh lighting off dark shadows) of Italy's Caravaggio with compositional complexity and explosions of dynamic fury, movement, color, and figures.
Many baroque commissions were officially sanctioned religious subjects or noble and royal portraits, but middle-class merchants, flush with wealth from the American colonies, were also ravenous for smaller genre scenes.
Significant artists include:
José de Ribera (1591-1652). The greatest master of chiaroscuro and tenebrism after Caravaggio, Ribera cranked out numerous paintings of a pale, wrinkle-faced, flaccid-armed St. Jerome. He worked mostly in Italy, but largely at the Spanish court in Naples, then under Spanish rule, so many of his earthily realistic works found their way back home, including Archimedes (1630) in Madrid's Museo del Prado.
Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). Spain's greatest painter, a prodigy who became Philip IV's court painter at 24, Velázquez studied in Italy, where he polished his unflinchingly naturalistic technique. Though his position meant the bulk of his work was portraiture (and he did this better than anyone), he was a master of all painting genres. The collection of Madrid's Museo del Prado spans his career, from the early Adoration of the Magi (1619) to Surrender of Breda (1634) to his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).
Francisco de Zubarán (1598-1664). Seville's master of chiaroscuro, Zubarán was unique in his use of orangeish candlelight to his clay figures, rather than the out-of-frame white light of Ribera and Caravaggio. Seville's Museo Provincial has several of his works. Defense of Cadiz (1634) in Madrid's Museo del Prado shows how he was adapting and lightening his formerly dark style to align it more with prevailing tastes.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-82). Zubarán's Seville competitor, Murillo created work with a distinctly brighter, more saccharine and sentimental quality. He eventually developed an estilo vaporoso (vaporous style) of loose brushwork, rich colors, and soft contours that loosely parallels the French rococo. His native Seville's Museo Provincial preserves several devout paintings, and the best of his patented (and oft-copied) Immaculate Conceptions are in Madrid's Museo del Prado.
Bourbon Rococo & Neoclassical (18th-19th C.)
Spain's turbulent late 18th and early 19th centuries are best seen in the progression of work by the unique master Goya. His works started in the prevailing rococo style (a chaotic, frothy version of the baroque) but soon went off on their own track. Spanish neoclassicism was dry, academic, and rather uninteresting.
Significant artists include:
Francisco Goya (1746-1828). Goya started as a painter of frothy, pastel-colored rococo works often of silly, joyful scenes (Parasol, 1777). He then became a courtly portraitist in the position of principal painter to Charles IV (Family of Charles IV, 1800), but his republican tendencies and encroaching deafness left him angry and prone to paint and engrave satirical attacks on the social system (Los Caprichos, 1796-98). He turned increasingly to more harshly, realistically painted works with the French Invasion (Clothed Maja and Naked Maja, 1800-03; the Third of May, 1808; Execution, 1814), but after the Restoration he was turned away by the new court. He retreated to his house, where he painted the deeply disturbing mythological/psychological Black Paintings (1821-22). He spent his final 4 years in Bordeaux, and returned to the brighter color and simpler, happier themes of his youth. His major works are in Madrid's Museo del Prado.
Madrid's Palacio Real. The Bourbons imported many artists, including Anton Mengs (1728-79) from Bohemia and Tiepolo (1696-1770) from Italy, to decorate their palace in the high baroque/emergent rococo style.
20th Century
Spain became an artistic hotbed again at the turn of the 20th century -- even if Barcelona's own Picasso moved to Paris. Though both movements were born in France, Spanish artists were key in developing cubism and surrealism. Cubists, including Spaniards Picasso and Gris, accepted that the canvas is flat and painted objects from all points of view at once, rather than using optical tricks like perspective to fool viewers into seeing three dimensions; the effect is a fractured, imploded look. Surrealists such as Dalí and Miró tried to express the inner working of their minds in paint, plumbing their ids for imagery.
Significant artists include:
Joan Miró (1893-1983). Greatest of the true surrealists in Spain, Miró created largely appealing work with a whimsical and childlike quality (save the dark works he did during the Spanish Civil War). The Catalán tended toward bright colors, especially blue, and was an accomplished sculptor as well. (The assemblages often look like three-dimensional versions of his paintings.) Barcelona's Fundació Joan Miró is the best place to get an overview of his work.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). The most important artist of the last century, Picasso dipped his brush into several of the important early-20th-century movements, helping establish cubism and redefine surrealism in the process. Though he lived in France after 1904, Spain has always hungrily acquired his works to serve as stars of modern art museums from Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum to Madrid's Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, which houses his masterpiece Guernica (1937), a bleak, confusing polemic about the horrors of war. Many of his early works are housed in Barcelona's Museu Picasso, where you find surprising examples of his teenage talent for realism.
Juan Gris (1887-1927). The truest of the cubists, Gris had a palette more colorful than that of Picasso or of France's Braque. He worked mostly in France, but Madrid's Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the contemporary art museum in Palma de Majorca hang some of his paintings.
Salvador Dalí (1904-89). The most famous surrealist was only briefly a member of that group. (His anti-Marxist and pro-Franco position got him kicked out.) Dalí's art used an intensely realistic technique to explore the very unreal worlds of dreams (nightmares, really) and paranoia in an attempt to plumb the Freudian depths of his own psyche. Some of his better works in Spain are at Madrid's Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Cadaqués's Perrot-Moore Museum, but be sure to visit the quirky Teatre Museu Dalí, which he founded in his native Figueres.
Antoni Tàpies (b. 1923). This abstract surrealist has been Spain's only significant artist since the Civil War. He founded his own museum for his art, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, in Barcelona.
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